“Holy Moses, Mister. What’s this stuff all over the side of your car?” The attendant bent down and peered, put the end of a finger in the blood, which was coagulated and about like gravy. “Holy Moses!” He ran into the service station and seized the telephone. “Flo, this is Jiggs. Get Doc over here in a hurry. Got a man here bled near to death.” The attendant now had a high thin voice. The telephone fell to the floor when he tried to put it back on the desk. He let it lie. He ran out for another look at the man in the car. “Harold! Harold!” He ran across the street to the chicken hatchery. Soon he came back with Harold, a stocky alert-eyed man. Harold said not to move the victim, never move an accident victim, and was Doc coming?
Harsh did not bother to comment. Lot of silly rummies, running around hollering, like chickens that had jumped out of that place across the street.
He closed his eyes, didn’t open them again till he heard another car squeal to a stop ten feet away, then a man’s voice. “What have you here, Jiggs?”
“Doc, I think he was shot. I didn’t touch him.”
Doc had the gaunt frame of an Abe Lincoln and the lazy movements and drawl of a cane-pole fisherman. “Jiggs, you better call Kenny Wilson for his ambulance.”
“Sure, Doc.”
A hypodermic needle was waved near Harsh’s face. “This won’t hurt. And you are going to be all right.”
Sure he was all right, Harsh thought, he was fine, they could fart around all day.
He was on a cart. A fat man in a white suit pushed him along between white walls under a beige ceiling. A nurse walked alongside, wiping the sweat off his forehead and from around his eyes. He was pushed into a room and the attendant left but the nurse stayed. Presently the doctor came in and stood looking at him.
“Feeling fine, eh?”
“You want the truth, Doc, I feel like I ain’t all here.”
The doctor got out a stethoscope, stuck the prongs in his ears and listened to Harsh’s chest. “You have a heart like a horse.”
“A galloping horse, maybe. What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s okay. How does your arm feel?”
“Feel? I don’t feel nothing.” They had cut off his arm, he decided. He was afraid to feel or even look to make sure, yet he wanted very much to know.
The doctor smoked a cigarette. He put his foot on a chair and knocked the cigarette ash into his trouser cuff. The room was soundless, but there was plenty of noise in the hallways. The bed smelled faintly of stuff they had put in the sheets to sterilize them.
“Tell me, Doc.”
“Yes?”
“My left arm, where did you cut it off?”
The doctor laughed as if someone had cracked a huge joke. “My lord, man. Your arm is full of medication, is all. You’re not going to lose the arm.”
“Oh. It didn’t feel as if it was there.” He felt good about the arm, and asked the doctor for a cigarette. The first puff made him sick and he tried to heave and his left arm hurt as though lightning had struck it. “Jesus God! What did you do to it?”
“Set it.” The doctor waited for the attack of pain to subside. “The arm was badly broken. But listen, the arm’s not the thing. Here’s the thing: Did you know you have O-negative blood?”
“What?”
“You have O-negative blood. Rather rare around here —only seven people out of a hundred have it. Do you know anybody we can get hold of who does? Any blood relatives in these parts?”
“Doc, I didn’t know there was such a thing as O-negative blood, whatever it is.”
“Well, you need a blood transfusion, Harsh, and we have no O-negative in our blood bank. If you know anybody that we can reach who has it, you had better tell me.”
“I can’t help you, Doc. How about just any old blood?”
The doctor shook his head. “If you’ve got O-negative, you can’t take any other type. It could kill you.” A heavy, white-haired, middle-aged nurse came into the room. She said she had been on the telephone to the Red Cross and learned they had an O-negative donor listed in a nearby town. He was a mechanic and was out at somebody’s farm fixing a tractor, but the police were sending a car over to bring him in. The doctor turned to Harsh. “You’re a lucky man, Harsh. I guess we’ll be able to get you fixed up.” But Harsh was asleep.
It was morning. He was lying on a hospital bed as naked as a jaybird under the sheet. The doctor came in and yanked back the sheet and pressed thoughtfully on his body with fingertips, then drew the sheet up to his chin.
“You’re feeling great, my boy.”
“That is one hell of an overstatement, Doc. What did you do to me?”
“The donor got here, that mechanic. You’re full of his blood now and good as new.” The doctor took a chart off a hook at the foot of the bed, looked at it, and put it back on the hook. “By the way, Harsh, there’s a city policeman out front. I’ll bring him in, so you can thank him for getting that blood donor up here for you.”
“Tell you the truth, Doc, I feel too sick to be seeing any cop.”
“Nonsense. You’re not that bad off.”
The doctor turned and went out. As soon as he had gone, Harsh tried to get out of bed. He did not want to talk to a police officer. But weakness seized him and he had to flop back on the bed and lie helpless. The blood out of that grease monkey, he thought, didn’t have much strength in it.
The policeman threw the door wide and came in. He was a big man with a bald head and an unfriendly manner, and it was immediately clear he was interested in getting more than thanks. He listened while Harsh said he understood the police had hunted up the blood donor, and thanks. Thanks a lot. Harsh wanted to get rid of him, and he was very polite.
“No sweat at all, fellow. Line of duty.” The officer got out a notebook. “Now, about that arm. What happened to it?”
“Well, a car sideswiped me, officer. Like I put in the report.”
“What report?”
“Hey! Say now, I guess I didn’t get around to that. Tell you the truth, I was in pretty bad shape. All the time I remember thinking, my arm is all smashed to hell, I got to get to a Doc, and I got to report this like the law says.”
“So those were sideswipe marks on your car?”
“Tell you the truth, officer, I wouldn’t know if my car was marked up or not. With this arm the way it was, I just couldn’t get up the steam to notice anything else.”
“How did it happen?”
“I had my elbow out the open window, the way a fellow drives along. Then like I say, here comes some bird and sideswipes me. You know something, officer, for a while there I didn’t even know I was hurt.”
“You remember anything about the car?”
“I couldn’t swear, but I think it was a green Chevy, this year’s model, a four-door, I think. The guy, he was in it all by himself, a smallish guy with a dark face, and he was wearing a tan cap. You know, that’s about all I remember. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I was crowding the center line.”
“When it happened, didn’t the other car stop?”
“Not that I saw. He high-tailed it right on down the road.”
“Where was this?”
“Officer, I wish I could tell you for exact sure, but it was south of the Iowa line a little ways, is the best I can do.”
The officer took a bite at the end of his pencil. “Your correct name is Walter Harsh. You’re from Hollywood, California. Right?”
“No. I don’t know where you got your information about me, officer, but I ain’t from Hollywood, California. I’m from Quincy, Illinois. Say now, wait—I’m the president of National Studios of Hollywood, that must have given you the idea I’m from Hollywood, California.”